by Tony Horwitz
Charles Clerke noted something else: a “convenience for conveying themselves upon the Water, which we had never met with before.” He described it as a thin board, six or eight feet long and shaped like a paper cutter. “Upon this they get astride with their legs, then laying their breasts along it, they paddle with their Hands and steer with their Feet.” Hawaiians rode these boards on top of high swells, calling their sport he’e nalu, or wave sliding.
The Hawaiians, for their part, marveled at the English and their strange and seemingly magical ways. Historians in the early nineteenth century gathered natives’ memories of first contact with Europeans. Islanders recalled thinking that the English had loose, wrinkled skin (clothes), angular heads (tricorns), volcanoes in their mouths (burning tobacco), and “a treasure hole in their side” (pockets). Their ships seemed like temples, “having steps going up into the clear sky, to the altars on the outside.”
Samwell wrote that Hawaiians were mesmerized by the ships’ clocks. The English, consulting these instruments constantly as they studied the sky, seemed to regard timepieces as gods commanding the heavens. Hawaiians also gazed with wonder at English writing, which they took to be a form of decorating cloth, like their own tapa work. And they relished English “novelties.” Native women wanted mirrors, and the men craved anything made of metal, a substance they’d occasionally encountered in pieces of floating wood, probably from Spanish ships.
A fortnight into this delightful visit, two events clouded the English stay, at least in hindsight. Cook needed firewood, a scarce commodity on the lava-covered hills ringing the bay. He asked James King—who acted the part Banks had on the first voyage, of intermediary with natives—to inquire whether the English could buy the fencing around the temple. King wrote that he “had some doubts about the decency of this proposal,” but the wood was “readily given.” Sailors also carried off carved idols, one of which King returned at the request of the priests.
That same day, William Watman, the “old” sailor of forty-seven who had come out of retirement at Greenwich Hospital to sail a second time with Cook, died of a stroke. “The Chiefs knowing of his death expressd a desire that he might be bury’d on shore,” King wrote, “which he was accordingly upon the Morai” (the English persisted in using the Tahitian term for temple rather than the Hawaiian word, heiau). Hawaiians watched the Christian service, then added chants of their own, throwing a pig and coconuts into Watman’s grave.
The next day, King wrote, the king and chiefs “became inquisitive as to the time of our departing & seemed well pleas’d that it was to be soon.” The islanders then collected a veritable Mauna Loa of food and trinkets—the largest offering King had seen in the gift-mad Pacific—and entertained their guests one last time with wrestling and boxing matches. The English reciprocated by igniting fireworks. Early on the morning of February 4, 1779, accompanied as they’d been on their entrance to Kealakekua by hundreds of canoes, the Resolution and Discovery sailed out of the bay.
One of the saddest to leave was King, who had made such an impression on Hawaiians that natives assumed he was Cook’s son, and asked the lieutenant to stay. But King, almost alone among the crew, sensed the danger inherent in Hawaiians’ apparent worship of the English. “They regard us as a Set of beings infinitely their superior,” he wrote. “Should this respect wear away from familiarity, or by length of intercourse, their behaviour may change.”
After finding Cook’s bomb, we continued down the coast to Pu’uhonua O Honaunau, a historic park that encompassed one of the most sacred sites in Hawaii. Its centerpiece, a massive stone enclosure known as the “place of refuge,” had served as a safety valve for the harshness of the kapu system. A taboo-breaker who managed to flee here by land or sea could shelter within the refuge’s seventeen-foot-thick walls and win absolution from the priests. The park also included a canoe landing, a chiefly residence, a fish pond (the Hawaiians had practiced aquaculture), and a reconstructed temple very similar to the one Cook visited at Kealakekua Bay, with a paling, fierce carved images, and a scaffold, or oracle tower, from which the priests petitioned their gods.
What struck me about the vast park, apart from the sophistication it revealed of precontact Hawaii, was its kinship with sacred sites I’d visited thousands of miles to the south, in Tahiti, Raiatea, Tonga, and even New Zealand. Polynesian society had not only been astonishingly far-reaching; its belief system—including the notions of tapu and mana, and the worship of ti’i representing ancestral gods—had proved incredibly durable, surviving in its essential form for many centuries, even in the outermost reaches of Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand.
Yet, as in other parts of Polynesia, traditional culture began unraveling within a generation of Cook’s visit. By the end of the eighteenth century, ships were pouring into Hawaii, bringing muskets, swivel guns, grog, and disease. In 1819, Hawaii’s alcoholic young king, under heavy pressure to adopt Western ways, went out in a boat, drank for three days, then came ashore and broke the taboo on eating with women—effectively destroying in a bite the kapu system, and with it the temples, idols, and centuries-old structure of belief.
A year later, New England missionaries sailed into this spiritual vacuum and wasted little time teaching the “naked savages,” as they called Hawaiians, the depravity of the hula and other traditions. By 1837, the decline of the native population and its culture was so pronounced that the Sandwich Island Institute (a precursor of the famous Bishop Museum) was formed to document what remained of Hawaiians’ tools, music, and customs. “In but a few years it is to be feared that they will be spoken of as a people who were but are not,” wrote the institute’s vice president. “Shall we coolly see these things pass before us without one effort to preserve a memoria of what the people were?”
As part of this work, the Bishop Museum later restored the place of refuge I was now visiting. At the park office, I found a native Hawaiian ranger with the wonderful name of Blossom Sapp. She’d grown up by Kealakekua Bay and had worked at the park for thirty years. In that time, she’d seen a resurgent interest in traditional belief—though the people embracing it were mostly New Age haoles.
“There’s a lot of crystal people who come here,” Blossom said, “a lot of meditation, a lot of chanting, a lot of lost or sick people trying to heal. We get them all.” Visitors often left offerings like those I’d seen on the steps of the temple at Kealakekua Bay: rocks wrapped in ti leaf (a symbolic way of giving back a bit of the land), oils, jewelry, even alcohol and Spam. “After a while we just collect and bury it,” she said.
There was another twist. The New Age had rubbed off on native Hawaiians. “A lot of locals come here now saying they feel a different ‘energy’ or a healing ‘spirit,’” Blossom said. “I didn’t hear those words from Hawaiians twenty-five years ago. It’s all sort of washed together, the old beliefs, the new ones, the whole ‘aloha’ notion of love and welcome.” She didn’t see any harm in this. New Age pablum might not be very true to ancient Hawaiian practices, but on balance it was preferable to kapu and human sacrifice.
Still, while traditional belief may have mellowed, political anger hadn’t. Many native Hawaiians were jobless and landless, effectively second-class citizens in what had once been their own country. In the late 1980s, when the park had introduced a $2 entry fee, many Hawaiians refused to pay. “They don’t want to pay to visit what they feel is their own land,” Blossom said.
Resurgent nationalism had also deepened the long-standing vilification of Cook. One outspoken sovereignty activist, Haunani-Kay Trask, had publicly labeled Cook “a syphilitic, tubercular racist” and declared her pride in the fact that Hawaiians, unlike other Pacific peoples, had made sure the captain didn’t leave their shores alive. “We can defend our honor by declaring that at least we killed Cook, and having done so we rid the world of another evil haole.” Her sister and fellow activist, Mililani Trask, had picketed a mall that once hosted a Captain Cook festival, and demanded that a coloring book gl
orifying Cook be pulled from shops. She also stated of the Cook monument at Kealakekua: “We have an obligation to trash that place.”
Blossom didn’t subscribe to this view. “Sooner or later the islands would have been found,” she said. “Cook didn’t steal the land or squash the culture, but his arrival brought others who did. So a lot of people just see him as the first bad guy, a symbol of everything bad that followed.”
Blossom had her own, tangible reminder of Cook’s visit: a cannonball, just like Arthur Kukua’s. She’d inherited it from her grandparents and displayed it on a shelf at home. I asked her why she kept it. Blossom shrugged. “Cook’s part of our history, whether we like him or not.”
After leaving Kealakekua Bay, the Resolution and Discovery sailed north for three days, toward the Alenuihaha Channel between Hawaii and Maui, one of the roughest passages in the Pacific. In a heavy gale, Cook’s ship once again failed him: the base of the foremast had rotted so badly that it shifted off the plate holding it to the hull. The ship also leaked. Making the necessary repairs in heavy seas was too risky. Cook saw no other option but to return to the known safety of Kealakekua Bay.
“All hands much chagrin’d & damning the Foremast,” King wrote, as the ships bore away. One can only imagine Cook’s chagrin, given his shaky state of mind and earlier tirade at the Navy Board about the shoddy outfitting of his vessel.
When the English sailed back into Kealakekua Bay, only a few canoes came out to greet them. “This in some measure hurt our Vanity,” King wrote, “as we expected them to flock about us, & to be rejoiced at our return.” One reason for the muted response was that the king had put a taboo on the bay until he could come greet the English himself. But when he did arrive, he asked why the ships had returned. The king seemed not to believe—or seemed to be displeased by—the reason given.
Soon after, thieving by islanders became rampant. And when barter resumed, Hawaiians demanded that they be traded iron daggers modeled on their own wooden ones. Cook’s armorers duly forged the weapons from two-foot-long spikes aboard the ships. Then, on February 13, just three days after the ships’ return, the last traces of hospitality vanished. Islanders harassed a watering party, and when marines were dispatched, natives laughed and jeered at them.
A scuffle broke out, one sailor hit a chief with an oar, and the crowd pelted crewmen with stones and beat two of them severely. Also, someone stole a pair of armorer’s tongs, perhaps to forge daggers on his own. When Cook, who was ashore at the time, learned of the theft, he joined in a confused chase after the man believed to have taken the tongs. But islanders purposefully misdirected Cook. The captain ended up wandering in circles for three miles.
Returning to the ship in a state of rage, he told King that the natives must not “imagine they have gaind an advantage over us.” He had also issued orders for the marines to load deadly musket balls rather than birdshot, and to fire at the first sign of further “insolence.” At dusk on February 13, a tense quiet descended on Kealakekua Bay.
At dusk on our fourth day in Hawaii, I left Cliff and Roger at a coffee shop and went in search of Henry Leslie, the Cook monument caretaker I’d heard about at the parking lot in Napo’opo’o. He lived in a suburban-style subdivision in Captain Cook, on a road called Captain Cook. Two massive dogs lunged at my throat as I entered the yard. I stopped just beyond the reach of their chains and shouted over their baying to a child standing in the doorway. “I’m looking for Mr. Leslie.”
“Which one?”
“The one who looks after the Cook monument.”
“Which one?”
“Henry.”
“Which one?”
At this point I felt like shaking the child, except that two man-eating dogs blocked my path. Then a woman appeared, and I explained myself all over again. She called inside and three men emerged. One introduced himself as Henry Leslie III, though he went by the name Sonny. Next to him was his son-in-law, also named Henry. Then came Sonny’s son, Randy. All three looked after the monument from time to time. As if this weren’t confusing enough, I had trouble making out their faces in the dwindling light. Nor could I tell their silhouettes apart: all three were big-gutted men in shorts, bare feet, and duckbill caps, holding beer cans.
“Come on in,” said Henry or Henry or Randy. I glanced at the dogs. “Mind if we talk out here? It’s a beautiful evening.” They came out and leaned against pickup trucks parked in the drive. Sonny dipped from a can of Skoal and explained that he was the third Henry Leslie to look after the Cook site, which had a very peculiar legal status. In 1877, a Hawaiian princess and her husband deeded the property to the British consul in Hawaii, for the express purpose of erecting a monument to Cook. Sixteen years later, a cabal of American sugar planters and missionaries’ sons overthrew the queen of what was then still the independent kingdom of Hawaii; soon after, the U.S. Congress voted to annex the islands. So the monument site, a little over fifty by a hundred feet, was a legal anomaly: a tiny piece of Britain lying within American territory.
At the time the monument was built, the Leslies were one of the few families still living and fishing at Ka‘awaloa, the village at the north end of the bay where the king and chiefs had resided during Cook’s visit. The British hired Sonny’s grandfather as caretaker, for a modest stipend. The job had since been passed from son to son. “Funny to think, isn’t it,” Sonny said, pausing to send a gob of snuff juice at one of the dogs, “that my family’s looking after a monument to a man our own ancestors probably helped knock off.”
The caretaking job, which paid $70 a month, basically involved tending the grounds within the chain enclosure, the only bit that belonged to Britain, and replacing vandalized plaques or toppled signposts. When I told the Leslies about the graffiti I’d seen the other day, Sonny shrugged. “There’s some crazy, lazy people who have nothing better to do than blame someone else for their problems.”
The Leslies had no time for that. Sonny worked as a construction-crew foreman, Randy installed swimming pools, Henry ran a photographic studio. Sonny and Henry were also employed at the golf-course development I’d heard about during our boat trip. I asked if they had any qualms about the project’s disruption of the environment, and of Hawaiian graves. “It’s jobs, you can’t stop progress,” Henry said. “But my dogs don’t agree.”
“What do you mean?”
“They won’t get out of the truck when I’m there,” he said. “The dogs can sense spirits, and the spirits are very strong at that place.” Henry’s job was to take photographs of archaeological sites in the development area. “They found some bones while building Fairway Six,” he said. “There’s a way to handle that. You remove the bones to another place, put herbs in the original grave, and consecrate the spot with a blessing. That wasn’t done with these bones. So there’s been some ups and downs ever since.”
“Like what?”
“People getting sick. Hearing things. Machines not working. The spirits just want to go home but they can’t.”
I sensed my questions were making the Leslies uncomfortable. Sonny had excused himself and gone inside. Randy stared at his feet. Even the dogs had gone quiet. I changed the subject and told Henry about my plan to visit the Cook site on the anniversary of the captain’s death. Henry nodded sympathetically. “If his spirit’s haunting you,” he said, “best to put him to rest.”
Chapter 14
Kealakekua Bay:
A Bad Day on Black Rock
I cannot forget Cook’s death. It is a sublime death in all respects, and it is also beautiful that the majesty of the untamed world has claimed its rights on him.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, 1781
Sunday, the fourteenth of February, 1779, dawned fine, with land and sea breezes—and the Discovery’s cutter stolen from its mooring. This, the ship’s largest boat, was crucial to the crew. Its theft was also a mark of “insolence” that Cook could not stand, unstrung as he was by the previous day’s troubles, including his goose-chase af
ter the burglar of the armorer’s tongs. Cook ordered a blockade of the bay, and the ships began firing cannon at canoes trying to run it.
Around seven A.M., James King came aboard, having spent the night onshore. He found Cook “loading his double Barreld piece.” King was Cook’s trusted lieutenant, but when he spoke to Cook, the captain cut him off. A moment later, Cook went ashore with ten marines, and posted armed sailors aboard two of the Resolution’s boats, the pinnace and launch, in the water near the lava shoreline.
Cook planned to do what he had done many times before in the Pacific: seize a chief and hold him until stolen goods were returned. This time, he went straight to the top, marching the marines into the chiefly village of Ka‘awaloa and ordering the marines’ lieutenant, Molesworth Phillips, into a hut where the king lay sleeping. The king agreed to return to the ship with Cook. But as the party neared the water, a crowd formed. The English had shot a chief dead at the other end of the bay, as he tried to run the blockade, and at some point news of this had reached Ka‘awaloa.
One of the king’s wives tried to stop her husband from going any farther. “With many tears and intreaties,” Molesworth Phillips later reported, she “beg’d he would not go onboard.” Two chiefs also held the king back and made him sit down. “The old Man now appear’d dejected and frighten’d,” Phillips said of the king. The lieutenant also observed that an “immense mob” of several thousand people had gathered, surrounding Cook and the ten marines. “It was at this period we first began to suspect that they were not very well dispos’d towards us,” Phillips said.